1. Technical Field
The invention relates to a new process of communication using computers and associated communications infrastructure. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for computed relevance messaging.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The aim of a communications process is to relay information between pairs of actors who, for purposes of the discussion herein, consist of an information provider and an information consumer. The following briefly discusses the concerns of each party.
Concerns of Information Provider
The information provider knows of pieces of information and of corresponding situations in which certain consumers would find those pieces of information interesting, useful, or valuable. For example, such pieces of information may concern problems consumers who have particular attributes might be interested in solving or that concern opportunities of interest to consumers having such particular attributes. The provider wishes to distribute the information to those consumers in those specific situations.
In principle, an information provider might know of thousands or millions of conditions about which it can offer information. The audience for such conditions might involve thousands or millions of consumers.
A particularly interesting situation is where a typical piece of information should be directed only to consumers having a very special combination of circumstances. A typical piece of information would in principle be of interest to only a small fraction of the consumer base, but where this small fraction nevertheless amounts to large number of consumers.
A challenging but very important case occurs when verifying when the conditions for applicability of a certain piece of information requires knowing a great deal of detailed information about the consumer, his concerns and affiliations, or his property. This information might be considered very sensitive by consumers, who would not want to participate in a process that required disclosure of the information to the provider. Therefore, it might seem impossible to target the information to consumers because only the consumers have access to the information required to make the determination that the information applies to them, and they are unwilling to expend the effort to make a determination themselves, or to give others access to the sensitive information required to make the determination on their behalf.
Concerns of Information Consumer
The consumer is an individual or organization that knows of information providers who have information of potential benefit to them. The consumer may in fact know of tens or hundreds of such providers. Typically, at any given moment, only a small fraction of the information being offered by the information provider is of potential interest to the consumer. The consumer does not want to review all the information available from the information provider. He would prefer to see the subset consisting of information, which is relevant to the consumer.
Typically, the information which the provider is offering changes with time and the conditions experienced by the consumer are changing with time. The consumer would prefer not to have to track changes continually in his own status and the status of the information provider""s offerings. He would also prefer not to have to remember that pieces of information published some time before could have suddenly become applicable.
The consumer would prefer that a procedure be available for automatically detecting the existence of applicable information as it became applicable, either because the consumer""s situation had changed, because the information provider""s offerings had changed, or because the conditions for applicability of the information involved time considerations which had become applicable. The consumer would prefer not to reveal to the provider information about his identity or the details of his interests, preferences, and possessions. Rather, the consumer would prefer to receive information in a form where he may carefully study it before using it.
The consumer would also prefer to have a method to inform himself about known problems with an information provider or with a certain piece of information before using the information. Typically, the consumer would prefer that if the decision to use a piece of information is made, the application of the information is painless and essentially automatic. The consumer would prefer to be insulated from the prospect of damage caused by incorrect information.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a communications technique that addressed each of the above concerns with regard to both the information provider and the information consumer.
The invention disclosed herein enables a collection of computers and associated communications infrastructure to offer a new communications process. This process allows information providers to broadcast information to a population of information consumers. The information may be targeted to those consumers who have a precisely formulated need for the information. This targeting may be based on information which is inaccessible to other communications protocols, for example because under other protocols the targeting requires each potential recipient to reveal sensitive information, or because under other protocols the targeting requires each potential recipient to reveal information obtainable only after extensive calculations using data available only upon intimate knowledge of the consumer computer, its contents, and local environment.
The targeting also includes a time element. Information can be brought to the attention of the consumer precisely when it has become applicable, which may occur immediately upon receipt of the message, but may also occur long after the message arrives. Again, this is a feature inaccessible under other communication protocols, where the time of distribution of information and the time of consumer notification are closely linked.
The communications process may operate without intruding on consumers who do not exhibit the precisely-specified need for the information, and it may operate without compromising the security or privacy of the consumers who participate. For example, in one implementation, the information provider does not learn the identity or attributes of the individuals who receive this information.
This process enables efficient solutions to a variety of problems in modern life, including the automated technical support of modern computers. In the technical support application, the disclosed invention allows a provider to reach precisely those specific computers in a large consumer population which exhibit a specific combination of hardware, software, system settings, data, and local environment, and to offer the users of those computers appropriate remedies to correct problems known to affect computers in such situations.
The presently preferred embodiment of the invention is specially tuned to address the concerns of consumers and providers in a technical support application. Many other interesting applications areas and embodiments of the invention are also described herein.
This particular embodiment of the invention is described as follows:
Actors, referred to herein as advice providers, author advisories, which are specially structured digital documents which may contain:
(1) Humanly-interpretable content, such as text and multimedia;
(2) Computer-interpretable content, such as executable programs and data; and
(3) Expressions in a special computer language called the relevance language.
The relevance language describes precise conditions under which a given advisory may be relevant to a consumer, by referring to properties of the environment of the consumer computer interpreting the message, such as system configuration, file system contents, attached peripherals, or remotely accessible data. The humanly-interpretable content in an advisory may describe the condition that triggered the relevance determination and propose an action in response to the condition, which could range from installing software to changing system settings to purchasing information or software. The computer-interpretable content may include software which performs a certain computation or effects a certain change in the system environment.
Advisories are communicated by a process of publication/subscription over a wide-area network such as the Internet. Advisories are placed by their authors at well-known locations, referred to herein as advice sites. Applications referred to as advice readers running on the computers of advice consumers periodically obtain advisories from advice servers which operate at advice sites.
Advice readers process the messages so obtained and automatically interpret the relevance clauses. They determine whether a given message is relevant in the environment defined by the consumer""s computer and associated devices. The user is then notified of those messages which are relevant, and the user may read the relevant advisories and invoke the recommended actions.
Relevance evaluation is conducted by parsing relevance language clauses into constituent method dispatches. These clauses invoke specific inspectors which can return specific properties of the computer, its configuration, its file system, or other component of interest. In effect, the list of properties of the environment which may be referred to in the relevance language and verified by the advice reader is determined by the contents of the inspector library installed at run-time.
The existence of standard inspector libraries provides the advice provider with a rich vocabulary for describing the state of the consumer computer and its environment. In one implementation, the collection of inspector libraries can be dynamically expanded by advice providers.
Advice readers operate continually in an automatic mode, gathering advice from many advice providers distributed across public networks such as the Internet, and diagnosing relevance as it occurs.
Advice readers following an advice gathering protocol, referred to herein as Anonymous Exhaustive Update Protocol, may operate in a manner which fully respects the privacy of the computer""s owner information resulting from the relevance determination, i.e. information obtained from the consumer computer, does not leak out to the server. Information on the consumer computer stays on the consumer computer unless the consumer approves its distribution.
Many variations on this specific embodiment are described in detail, including variations which have very different applications, very different message formats, very different gathering protocols, very different security and privacy attributes, very different methods of describing the consumers to whom a message may be relevant, and very different trust relationships between consumer and provider (e.g. master-slave relationships). The disclosed invention is shown to be capable of effective embodiment in all these settings.